Purity

by Jonathan Franzen

  “What are the polls showing?” I asked her when she’d exhausted the subject of McCaskill’s contributions to the moral fiber of the nation. “Does Arne have a chance?”

  “Arne has run the most exemplary campaign the state of Colorado has ever seen,” she said. “We’re still suffering from the aftereffects of a lowlife president who put his lowlife cronies’ interests before the public good. What a gift that was to the special-interest-pandering Democrats and their sickening, grinning peanut farmer. Why any rational person would think that Arne has anything to do with Watergate, it mystifies me, Tom, it really does. But the other side slanders and slanders and panders and panders. Arne refuses to pander. Why would he pander? Is it really so hard to understand that a person with twenty million dollars and a thriving business only descends into the gutter of Colorado politics if he’s animated by civic responsibility?”

  “So, that’s a no?” I said. “The polls aren’t looking good?”

  I could never get a straight answer from her anymore. She droned on about Arne’s honesty and integrity, Arne’s fiercely independent mind, Arne’s sensible business-based solution to the problem of stagflation, and I hung up the phone still not knowing what the polls showed.

  The following Saturday night, Lucy and Bob threw a Halloween party at their house. Oswald and I put on suits and dark glasses and earphones and went as Secret Service agents. Bob’s many friends, people who’d been living within a mile of their alma mater for nearly a decade, people for whom it was a political statement to invest their energies in absurdities and trivialities, had come in ungainly conceptual costumes (“I am the Excluded Middle,” a guy sandwiched between slabs of Styrofoam informed us gravely at the door) and were filling the place with reefer smoke. Bob himself was wearing moose antlers, signifying Bullwinkle, with Lucy as his sidekick, Rocky. She’d blackened her nose, covered the rest of her face with brown greasepaint, and dressed in brown stretch pajamas with a tail of real animal fur attached above her butt. She scampered over to Oswald and me and offered to let us touch her tail.

  “Must we?” Oswald said.

  “I’m Rocky the Flying Squirrel!”

  She seemed possibly stoned. I was already embarrassed to be there with Oswald, who had no patience with counterculture zaniness. I scanned the living room for younger, edgier faces and was surprised to see Anabel, standing alone in a corner, her arms crossed firmly. Her costume was no costume—jeans and a jean jacket.

  Lucy could see where I was looking. “You know what her costume is? ‘Ordinary person.’ Get it? She can only pretend to be ordinary.”

  “That’s Anabel Laird,” I explained to Oswald.

  “Hard to recognize without the butcher paper.”

  Anabel caught sight of me and widened her eyes in her hanged-person way. It was interesting to see her in denim—it really did look like a costume on her.

  “I should go talk to her,” I said.

  “No, she needs to try to mingle,” Lucy said. “This happened at our Bastille Day party, too. People can tell she’s worth talking to, they’re coming up to me and asking who she is, but they’re afraid to go near her. I don’t know why she bothers coming to parties where she doesn’t think anyone’s good enough for her.”

  “She’s shy,” I said.

  “That’s one word for it.”

  Anabel, seeing that we were talking about her, turned her back on us.

  “Take us to your beer,” Oswald said.

  I was following him to the kitchen when Lucy grabbed my hand and said she had something to show me. We went upstairs to her bedroom. In the harsh light of its ceiling fixture, she looked like Lucy but also like a small animal. I asked what she wanted me to see.

  “My tail.” She turned around and wagged the fur at me. “Don’t you want to touch my tail?”

  Who doesn’t enjoy touching fur? I stroked her tail, and she backed into me, grinding her butt against my thighs, dislodging the tail. This was sort of hot and sort of not. She brought my hands up to her breasts, which were lolling free under the pajamas, and declared, “I’m the little squirrel that loves to fuck!”

  “Wow, OK,” I said. “But aren’t you also, like, hosting a party?”

  She turned herself around in my arms, took off my shades, and pressed her face to mine. Her greasepaint had a strong crayon smell. “Has anybody ever lost their virginity to a squirrel?”

  “Hard to know,” I said.

  “Would it even count?”

  She put her tongue in my mouth and then led me to the bed. Sex with a squirrel who had exciting breasts beneath her little-kid pajamas was not without its appeal, and I was feeling strangely unconcerned about Anabel; I intuited that being pounced on by someone else might even advance my cause with her. But when Lucy got around to drawing my hand under the waistband of her pajamas, saying, “Feel what a furry little animal I am,” I couldn’t help seeing her silliness through the appalled eyes of Oswald, whose personality made me think of Anabel’s, her judgments, her hanged-person eyes, which made me pull my hand away. I stood up and put my shades back on. “I’m sorry,” I said.

  Lucy was too programmatic about sex to betray, or possibly even to feel, any hurt. “That’s OK,” she said. “We don’t have to do anything you’re not ready for.”

  I could smell the greasepaint on my face; I must have looked like I’d been eating shit. When I went to the bathroom to clean myself up, I discovered a large brown smudge on the collar of my dress shirt, the only good one I owned.

  Downstairs the music was King Crimson, a favorite of Bob’s. Anabel was nowhere to be seen. Oswald was near the front door with the Excluded Middle, who was holding a rubber-banded bundle of pamphlets.

  “Our friend here has published a chapbook of poetry,” Oswald explained to me.

  “Poetry should be free,” the Excluded Middle said, handing me a chapbook. “This is my gift to you.”

  “Read the first one for Tom,” Oswald urged him. “I love the joie de vivre.”

  “My bare soles squoosh the black spring muck,” the Excluded Middle recited. “The earth is my WHOOPEE CUSHION!”

  “There you have it,” Oswald said. “A miracle of poetic compression.”

  “Did you see Anabel?” I said. “Anabel Laird?”

  “She just walked out.”

  “Wearing a jean jacket?”

  “The very one.”

  I hurried out to the street. When I got to the corner of Market Street, I saw Anabel at the next corner, waiting for the light. I could feel that she’d become, in the space of half an hour, the person in the world it mattered most to me to catch sight of. She must have heard my running footsteps, but she didn’t look at me, even when I reached her side.

  “How could you leave?” I said, breathing hard. “We hadn’t talked yet.”

  She angled her face away from mine. “What makes you so sure I wanted to talk to you?”

  “I was attacked by a rabid squirrel. I’m sorry.”

  “You can still go back,” Anabel said. “She seems very determined to take you. I’m guessing you’re the problem she and the Handyman are having? I saw him in those ridiculous antlers and I thought: that is more perfect than he even knows.”

  “Can we go somewhere?” I said.

  “I’m going home.”

  “Right. OK.”

  “I can’t stop you from taking the same train, though. If you follow me to my door and ask politely, I might let you sit in my kitchen.”

  “Why did you come to the party?” I said. “You knew you’d hate it.”

  “Do you want me to say it was because I thought you’d be there?”

  “Was that the reason?”

  She smiled, still not looking at me. “I’m not going to draw your conclusions for you.”

  Her apartment was on the top floor of a well-maintained old house, not a student place, and her kitchen was a vision of cleanliness. She took her shoes off at the door and asked me to do the same. In a rustic white pottery bowl
on the table were three perfect apples, on the windowsill two volumes of The Vegetarian Epicure, on the stove a gleaming copper-clad skillet. There was also, on the largest wall, a poster from a butcher shop, a diagram of a cow segmented and labeled as cuts of beef. I studied it, learning where the brisket and the chuck were, while Anabel left the kitchen and came back with an expensive-looking bottle.

  “Here we have Château Montrose,” she said. “The same vintage as my birth year. My father sent me a whole case for my birthday, which I’d be doing him a favor if I said was no worse than insensitive and symbolically grotesque, given how my mother died. I suspect his actual motives were more sinister. But I won’t drink alone, for obvious reasons, and Nola is the only person who ever comes here, and she can’t drink red wine with the medication she’s on, so I still have ten bottles. It’s your lucky night.”

  “What happened to the other two?”

  “I took them to Lucy on Bastille Day. She’s one of my oldest friends, I wanted to bring her something nice. But she was too grateful, if you know what I mean. One or two references to my amazing generosity would have been enough. After that it became a hostile comment on my privilege. Not just my privilege—me personally. I have to say, I know you’re still friends with her, but I’m at the point where she’s literally turning my stomach.”

  “Me too, a little bit,” I said.

  “Are you aware that you have squirrel on your collar?”

  “She took some fending off.”

  “You’ll notice I didn’t ask why you were at the party.”

  “Look where I am now,” I said. “I’m here, not there.”

  “Undeniably.”

  We clinked glasses, and I wished her a belated happy birthday. This led to our comparing birth dates. Hers turned out to be April eighth. Mine is August fourth.

  The symmetry of 4/8 and 8/4 had a powerful effect on Anabel. “Good Lord,” she said, staring at me as if I were an apparition. “Did you just make that up? Is your birthday really August fourth?”

  The signs meant more to her than they did to me. For her they were a way for us to be about more than just chemistry, to be something in the stars, while for me they served mainly to confirm the chemistry of my feelings for her. When the wine had warmed her up and she took off her jean jacket, I saw my fate not in calendrical coincidence but in the thinness of her upper arms, in what they did to my heart.

  Under the influence of wine and mystical sign, she set about improving me that night. To be with her, I’d need better ambitions. When she learned that I was applying to journalism school, she said, “And then what? You go to city council meetings in Topeka for five years?”

  “It’s an honorable tradition.”

  “But is that what you want? What do you want?”

  “I want to be famous and powerful. But you have to pay your dues first.”

  “What if you could start your own magazine? What would you do with it?”

  I said I would try to serve the truth in its full complexity. I told her about the politically polarized house I’d grown up in, my father’s blind progressivism, my mother’s faith in corporations, and how effectively the two of them could poke holes in each other’s politics.

  “I could tell your mother a thing or two about corporations,” Anabel said darkly.

  “But the alternative doesn’t work, either. You get the Soviet Union, you get the housing projects, you get the Teamsters union. The truth is somewhere in the tension between the two sides, and that’s where the journalist is supposed to live, in that tension. It’s like I had to be a journalist, growing up in that house.”

  “I know what you mean. I had to be an artist for the same reason. But that’s why I can’t see you wasting five years in Topeka or wherever. If you already know you want to serve the truth, you should serve it. Start a magazine like nobody else’s. Not liberal, not conservative. A magazine that pokes holes in both sides at the same time.”

  “The Complicater.”

  “That’s good! You should remember that. I’m serious.”

  In the glow of her approval, it seemed almost possible that I could start a magazine called The Complicater. And would she be talking about my future if she didn’t think she might be a part of it? The thought of this future, the love it would imply, led me to the thought of reaching across the table and touching her hand. I was just about to do it when she stood up.

  “I have a project, too.” She went over to the diagram of the beef cuts. “This is my project.”

  “I was wondering why a vegetarian had a cow poster in her kitchen.”

  “I don’t have it all figured out yet. And it’s going to take me fifteen years to complete. But if I can do it, it’s going to be like your magazine: like nothing the world has ever known.”

  “Can you tell me what it is?”

  “Let’s see if I ever see you again first.”

  I stood up and joined her by the diagram. “Do I have to stop eating beef?”

  She turned to me in surprise. “Yes, now that you mention it. That would be a requirement.”

  “And what sort of thing would you give up?”

  “A lot,” she said, retreating to the table. “I’ve gotten good at being alone. This kitchen smells the way I want it to smell. I have a problem with smells, I smell things that nobody else can. I’m smelling greasepaint on you right now. It’s nice to be able to control my smell environment, and I can hear myself think better when it’s quiet. It wasn’t easy to become a person who’s OK being alone on a Saturday night, but I did the work, I got there, and now some part of me is wishing I hadn’t gone out tonight. Some part of me wants you not to be here. But it’s like you were fated to be here.” She took a breath and looked me directly in the eye. “I waited at that corner for you, Tom. I looked at my watch, and I said I’m waiting five minutes. And you came in four. Four eight, eight four.”

  My heart began to pound. I was becoming a sign, I was losing my self, and although I was obviously excited to learn that Anabel had waited for me, the surge of blood in my groin might have been the erection they say men get at the moment of being executed. That was how it felt.

  I went to her and dropped to my knees. No less powerful than my desire for her was my wish, now on the verge of being granted, to be the person she allowed into her private world—to mean something in the story she was telling herself. When she put her hands on my shoulders and knelt down in front of me I experienced the gravity of what it meant to her to do this, and was excited even more for her sake than for mine. I looked into her eyes.

  She said, “This is our fourth encounter, you know.”

  “If you count the phone call.”

  “Are you going to kiss me?”

  “I’m afraid to,” I said.

  “I’m afraid, too. I’m afraid of you. I’m afraid of us.”

  I brought my face closer to hers.

  “You break it, you pay for it,” she whispered.

  I could have kissed her all night. I did kiss her all night. How the hours can pass with mere kissing is lost to me now, along with the rest of my youth. And there were pauses, certainly. There was gazing into each other’s eyes, there was pleasurable discussion of when exactly we’d become inevitable. There was the bounty of her hair, the pure Anabel smell of her skin, the little gap in her front teeth, the physical outskirts with which I needed to acquaint myself before proceeding deeper. There were new apologies and small confessions. There was her sudden, mad, amusing licking of the linoleum to prove to me how clean Anabel Laird kept a kitchen floor. Later there was a move to the sofa in her living room. There was the closed door of the bedroom that nobody but Anabel entered. But mostly we just kissed until dawn exposed us to our raw-eyed selves.

  Anabel sat up and reassembled her composure like a cat after an awkward leap. “You need to go now,” she said.

  “Of course.”

  “I can’t let you in all at once. You can apparently go straight from Lucy to me without skipping
a beat, but I’m out of practice.”

  “I wouldn’t call myself practiced.”

  She nodded seriously.

  “I have something to confess and something to ask you,” she said. “I need you to know that Lucy told me things about you. I wanted to scream at her, Shut up! shut up! But she told me you’re a virgin.”

  How I hated that word. It sounded outmoded and obscene and accurate.

  “Well, so here’s my confession: it matters to me. It’s why I waited for you at the corner. I mean, I waited because I wanted to see you. But also because I thought you might be a person I could start over with. Do you even understand how clean you are?”

  My underpants were sticky from hours of steady seepage, but Anabel was right: my dick and I were barely on speaking terms. The stickiness, like the dick itself, was a male embarrassment and seemed to have little to do with the tenderness I felt toward her.

  “But that’s not my question,” she said. “My question is what did Lucy tell you about me.”

  “She told me”—I chose my words carefully—“that you’d had some bad experiences in high school and hadn’t had a boyfriend in a long time.”

  Anabel gave a little shriek. “God I hate her! Why did I stay friends with this person?”

  “I don’t care what you did at Choate. I won’t talk about you again with her.”

  “I hate her! She’s a gutter with no grate. She has to drag everything down to her level. I know her. I know exactly what she told you.” Anabel squeezed her eyes shut, pushing out mascara tears. “You have to go now, OK? I need to be in my room.”

  “I’ll go, but I don’t understand.”

  “I want us to be different. I want us to be like nothing else.” She opened her eyes and smiled at me timidly. “It’s really OK if you don’t want to. You’re just a very nice person, Denver-born. I’d understand if you didn’t want any of this.”